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An experiment in “otherness”: Von Trier’s Nymphomaniac (2013)
This paper was first published in the South African Journal of Art History 32 (1), ISSN 0258-
3542, 2017, pp. 137-152.
Bert Olivier
University of the Free State
OlivierG1@ufs.ac.za
This article addresses the question of extreme sexual otherness, in the form of “perversion”, in Von
Trier’s film duo, Nymphomaniac, Volumes 1 and 2 (2013). After reconstructing the narrative of the film
several theoretical strategies are adopted to make sense of it, given the fact that it is a disconcerting,
disturbing film. First Freud is enlisted to grasp the psychoanalytical conception of perversity, not as a
newly acquired condition, but as one initially lost by “normal” subjects, in light of the sexually
undifferentiated or “perverse” nature of children’s sexuality. In the case of the protagonist in the film, Joe,
it is not lost; on the contrary, it is pursued and developed. Foucault’s work on the history of sexuality
casts further light on the film narrative through his painstaking demonstration that, far from having been a
time of the unilateral repression of sex and different sexualities, the 18th and 19th centuries saw a veritable
explosion in sexualities through the discursive examination, documentation and classification of sexual
practices, of which the spectrum of diverse “unnatural” pleasures (“perversions”, including
nymphomania) deserves attention in the present context. Finally, the work of Žižek on the ideology of
multiculturalism, where he distinguishes different kinds of “racism”, enables one to understand Joe’s
rejection of the therapy she is offered as predicated on her insight into the “racism” by which it is
motivated, which is conditional on her “becoming normal”. In the final analysis, Joe exemplifies what
Lacan sees as someone who has taken up her desire.
Key words: film, nymphomania, otherness, perversity, sexuality
’n Eksperiment in “andersheid”: Von Trier se Nymphomaniac (2013)
Hierdie artikel handel oor uiterste seksuele andersheid, in die gewaad van “perversie”, in Von Trier se
film(s), Nymphomaniac (Volumes 1 en 2; 2013). Na die film-narratief gerekonstrueer is word etlike
teoretiese perspektiewe benut om dit te interpreteer, veral omdat dit ’n ontstellende narratief
verteenwoordig. Freud word ingespan om die psigoanalitiese begrip van perversie te verhelder, nie as ’n
nuutverworwe “toestand” nie, maar as een wat “normale” subjekte aanvanklik “verloor” vanweë die
seksueel-ongedifferensieërde of “perverse” aard van kinder-seksualiteit. By die hoofkarakter van die film,
Joe, gaan dit egter nie verlore nie; inteendeel – dit word deur haar toegeëien en ontwikkel. Foucault se
geskiedenis van seksualiteit werp verdere lig op die filmnarratief deur sy noukeurige demonstrasie dat,
instede van om ’n tyd te gewees het van ’n eensydige repressie van seks en uiteenlopende seksualiteite,
die 18de en 19de eeue getuie was van ’n vermenigvuldiging van seksualiteite deur diskursiewe
ondersoek, dokumentering en klassifikasie van seksuele praktyke, waarvan die spektrum van
uiteenlopende “onnatuurlike” genietinge (“perversies”, insluitend nimfomanie) relevant is vir die huidige
ondersoek. Laastens stel die werk van Žižek oor die ideologie van multikulturalisme, waar hy
verskillende vorme van “rassisme” onderskei, ‘n mens in staat om Joe se verwerping van die terapie wat
haar aangebied word te begryp as uitdrukking van haar insig, dat dit “rassisties” gemotiveer is, en
bowendien voowaardelik is ten opsigte van haar “normalisering”. Joe kan dus in Lacaniaanse terme
gesien word as iemand wat haar “begeerte” opgeneem het.
Sleutelwoorde: andersheid, film, nimfomanie, perversiteit, seksualiteit
When addressing what must surely count as one of the most disconcerting aspects of the
human condition, namely so-called perversion, there are several options open to one. You can
approach it from the perspective of psychoanalytic theory, for example, or you could use a
narratological angle to make it intelligible, just to list two possibilities, or one could combine
attention to narrative with other theoretical angles, such as psychoanalytic theory or
poststructuralist (Foucaultian) genealogy. After all, narrative is probably the interpretive
category most accessible to humans (as both psychoanalysis and genealogical analysis
recognise), given the inescapable fact that every human subject has a life-story by means of
which he or she gains a measure of self-understanding. For this reason I propose to examine
Danish director, Lars von Trier’s cinematic bilogy, Nymphomaniac (Volumes 1 and 2; 2013),
as a cinematic-narrative investigation of nymphomania as a sexual “perversion”, or what may
also be described as a cinematic “experiment in otherness”. In the process I shall avail myself
of psychoanalytical and Foucaultian genealogical insights, as well as Slavoj Žižek’s analysis
of the paradoxes of multiculturalism (which is largely psychoanalytically oriented), to
facilitate my interpretation of the film. Given the fundamental role of narrative in every
individual’s life (Lacan 1977), what the film demonstrates, I believe, is that narrative –
whether cinematic or literary – is a kind of “privileged” means for communicating one’s
understanding of the human condition in some of its more “unpalatable” manifestations, with
the proviso that narrative can be appropriated from different theoretical perspectives.
There are no grounds to claim that my philosophical and psychoanalytical
interpretation(s) of Von Trier’s cinematic dilogy is exhaustive, of course – as my remarks on
methodology, below, will confirm, I regard the film as being interpretively susceptible to
several (in fact, multiple) interpretations, each of which would have its own (contestable)
claims to validity. For example, Tarja Laine’s (2015) interpretation of the relationship
between two of the main characters in Nymphomaniac (Joe, the narrator, and Seligman, the
listener) in allegorical terms as a representation of the relationship between viewers and
cinema in general terms is illuminating in its own right, particularly regarding the fluctuating
reciprocity of energy-flows between these two poles in each case. Linda Badley’s (2015)
understanding of Nymphomaniac, in turn, parses it through a Sadean lens, arguing that Von
Trier’s film(s) displays the same excess and “compulsion” to expose everything possible that
one encounters in De Sade, although she detects a significant, bewildering shift at the level of
affect in the sadomasochism of Volume Two, which, in her view, differs radically from De
Sade. Given the divergence of these approaches, however, as well as their deviation from my
own, I believe that it is superfluous to delve further into these publications. Besides, even if
other authors were to adopt the same theoretical viewpoints as mine, it is highly unlikely that
their interpretations would coincide with my own.
Nymphomaniac: The film narrative
It is imperative to reconstruct the narrative of the film(s) here, lest the sense of the subsequent
analysis be lost in the absence of a minimal familiarity with the relevant fictional events in
the protagonist’s life, as outlined by herself as narrator. Von Trier’s film-duo tells the story,
in great, if sometimes excruciating sexual detail, of Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg; as young
woman Stacy Martin), a woman who is found, badly beaten up, by Seligman (Stellan
Skarsgård), a middle-aged bachelor, in the alley near his apartment. Seligman takes her to his
apartment where he makes her as comfortable as he can. Once settled in his spare bedroom,
Joe starts telling Seligman her story in “episodes”, and in an interesting dialogical
communicational manner, which proceeds by way of association, Seligman responds to her
by delving associatively into his wide spectrum of knowledge based on extensive reading.
For instance, a fly-fishing hook on the bedroom wall reminds Joe of a protracted incident on
a train when she and a friend bet on who could have sex with most men (in the toilet, mostly),
to which Seligman responds by comparing their quest to fly-fishing, pointing out parallels as
her tale progresses.
Joe tells Seligman about her sexual life in eight “episodes”, marking what she regards
as the most significant events that have shaped her sexual persona (Nymphomaniac Volume
One: “The ‘Compleat’ Angler”; “Jerôme”; “Mrs. H”; “Delirium”; “The Little Organ School”;
Nymphomaniac Volume Two: “The Eastern and the Western Church (‘The Silent Duck’)”;
“The Mirror”; “The Gun”). Each of these episodes is prompted, in an ostensibly arbitrary
fashion, by some item in Seligman’s apartment (like the fly-fishing hook, referred to earlier)
or by something that crops up in their exchanges. It is clear from her tale that she was
fascinated with sexual pleasure from a very young age, having early discovered those parts of
her body that are instrumental in providing her with pleasure. She details the events of the
day she lost her virginity to a young man, Jerôme (Shia LaBeouf) whom she casually asks to
have sex with her. As things turn out, Jerôme proves to be the most important man in her life
as far as her chequered sex life is concerned. The other important man is her father (Christian
Slater), a medical doctor who has an inordinate love for trees, and whose painful death, of
cancer, she describes in the episode called “Delirium”.
After sharing with Seligman her feelings about the lack of masculinity on the part of
men who eat pastry using cake forks, Joe elaborates on lust and love (which she cynically
rejects) in the context of her growing experience with different lovers. When she drops out of
medical school and starts working at a printing company she discovers to her surprise that
Jerôme is her employer. Initially she ignores his sexual advances in favour of sleeping with
other men in the company, but when she finally admits to herself that she has fallen in love
with him and writes him a letter to this effect, Jerôme has departed with another employee –
the secretary who worked for his uncle (the company owner). When the latter fires her, Joe
has no other option than to seek solace in exploring her nymphomania with other lovers,
although she really wants Jerôme.
In one of the episodes (“Mrs H”), she recalls an event which taught her that her way of
life, which included regular sex with married men, always harbours the possibility of painful
consequences. When H (Hugo Speer) leaves his wife and children to be with Joe, his
distraught wife (Uma Thurman) appears at Joe’s apartment with their children and makes a
scene, only to be interrupted by the next lover on Joe’s schedule. When Joe visits the hospital
where her father is dying, witnessing his suffering impels her to take her mind off it by
having sex with several men at the hospital. But things seem to work in Joe’s favour – after
narratively exploring the different qualities she loved in three lovers, she tells Seligman how
she unexpectedly bumped into Jerôme in a park where she regularly walked (an improbable
coincidence, according to Seligman). Her joy at rediscovering Jerôme is short-lived,
however. Although she has genuinely mutual, extremely passionate sex with Jerôme, Joe
discovers to her dismay that she has lost all sensual feeling in her sexual organs. Volume One
of Nymphomaniac concludes at this point.
Volume Two commences with Joe taking issue with the fact that Seligman
“allegorises” the very real sexual experiences on her part that she shares with him in
confidence. She charges that he shows scant understanding of the seriousness of her loss of
sexual pleasure, in particular. Seligman feels constrained to defend himself, and does so by
confiding in her not only his virginity – despite being middle-aged – but also his asexuality.
This, he claims, uniquely qualifies him as the right person to listen to her story, because
unlike other people (with “normal” sexual needs), as a sexual “innocent” he can do so in a
completely unbiased manner. When she notices an icon of the Virgin Mary on the wall Joe
resumes her life-story by associating it with an episode from her early youth. During a field
trip she has a spontaneous orgasm in the course of a vision of what she evidently thought to
be the Virgin, although her description of the figures leads Seligman to inform her that this
was not the case, and that their attributes marked them as pagan figures instead (the Whore of
Babylon and Valeria Messalina, a Roman empress known for her promiscuity).
Returning to the crisis in her sex life when she lost all sexual sensitivity, Joe resumes
her saga. She and Jerôme have a baby whom they name Marcel, but despite being happy with
Jerôme, Joe’s excessive sexual demands become too much for Jerôme, prompting him to
share Joe with other lovers. Desperately trying to regain her lost orgasm (and in spite of
Jerôme’s increasing jealousy), Joe leaves no novelty untried, including a sexual assignation
with two African brothers, who end up wrecking the threesome when they start arguing
vehemently in their own language, with Joe looking on uncomprehendingly. One realises the
extent to which Joe’s sexual “identity” as a nymphomaniac is inseparable from her as a
person when her desperation drives her to visit a sadomasochist, K (Jamie Bell), who offers
his services to women who need them for sexual satisfaction. Joe becomes so dependent on
K’s unorthodox “assistance” (which is only available at night) that she starts neglecting
Marcel, who is rescued from falling over the balcony by Jerôme when he returns home and
finds the baby unattended – an intertextual scene that references a similar one from Von
Trier’s earlier film, Antichrist (2009).
Confronted by Jerôme with a stark choice between the single-minded pursuit of her
own sexual persona and a relatively stable, “normal” life with him and their son, Joe decides
in favour of the latter, with the result that she never sees Marcel again (who is eventually
placed in a foster home by Jerôme). She does regain her sexual climax, though, in the course
of K giving her a lacerating beating with the notorious “cat o’ nine tails”, in addition to which
he introduces her to what is cryptically referred to as the “Silent Duck” – a sexual technique
where someone inserts his (in this case K’s) or her hand in the shape of a duck’s beak into a
woman’s vagina. (These two examples of sado-masochistic sex in action, shown with no
holds barred, are sufficient to convince one that squeamish viewers should not watch this
intermittently harrowing film – something which is true of other films by Lars von Trier too,
such as the simultaneously acclaimed and controversial Dancer in the Dark; 2000.)
A mirror facing the bed reminds Joe of something that happened several years after
parting ways with Jerôme and Marcel, and she proceeds to tell Seligman about it. Having
recovered her ability to experience pleasure, and in a new job, Joe notices that her genitalia
are bleeding – evidently as a result of injury resulting from her sado-masochistic relationship
with K – and uses a mirror to inspect the damage. Her new boss, who (like the rest of her
colleagues) is aware of her unconventional sexual activities, instructs her to attend therapy
sessions for sex addiction, lest she lose her job and forfeit the opportunity of future
employment. In the Director’s Cut edition of Nymphomaniac (Volume 2), an argument
between Joe and Seligman ensues when, to explain her attitude to therapy, she relates to him
how she was forced to perform an abortion on herself, using her rudimentary medical
knowledge.
At any rate, after being ordered by her manager to attend therapy sessions, Joe
reluctantly agrees, and for some time concentrates on restraint. In the course of a meeting
about three weeks into therapy, on the verge of addressing the group with a prepared speech,
Joe imagines catching a glimpse of herself (as she looked when she was younger) in the
mirror. This proves to be a turning point: she abandons her prepared statement, defiantly
addresses the group, including the psychologist in charge, informing them that, being a
nymphomaniac, she is different from them, and that she loves being one. In the face of the
evident extreme discomfort of the members of the group, she also refers to the policing
function of the therapy sessions, which she refuses to submit to. Having asserted her pride in
her own distinctive sexuality, she turns her back on them and walks out of the room.
In the final episode of Volume Two (“The Gun”), Joe’s narration is triggered by a stain
left on the wall by the cup of tea she threw against it in an earlier fit of anger. The stain
resembles a pistol, specifically a Walther PPK, which is integral to her final narrative
installation. Finally coming to the conclusion that she is a social misfit, Joe enters the shady
world of organised crime, and with the help of someone called L (Willem Dafoe), who is well
versed in its modus operandi, she assumes the role of a “debt collector” who does not take no
for an answer. In the course of her work Joe’s experience and knowledge of sex (including
sadomasochism), as well as of all kinds of men, stands her in good stead. One instance (that
she shares with Seligman) of getting someone as far as settling his debt, in particular, gives
one more insight into Joe’s character. With the man tied to a chair she pulls down his pants
and starts narrating sexual fantasies to detect his own sexual weakness. At her wits end,
having exhausted every seductive scene she could think of and still finding him inscrutable,
she finally hits a bullseye when she tells him an imaginary story about himself and a
schoolboy, who eventually (in the story) asks whether he could go home with the man
concerned. As her story unfolds, despite himself, the man gets an erection, which lets the cat
out of the bag, as it were: he is a paedophile, but one so secretive about it that, as she tells
Seligman, the man probably did not realise it himself, having repressed the knowledge of his
socially prohibited sexuality. Out of pity for him, she performs fellatio on the man, to
Seligman’s consternation, (on hearing this part of her story), explaining – significantly – that
she feels profound compassion for people with forbidden sexualities, who are social outcasts
like herself. Moreover, she feels admiration for him because he evidently kept this secret to
himself, sentencing himself to a life of (heroic) loneliness, rather than to act in accordance
with his forbidden desire.
Predictably, this last episode (‘The Gun”) of Nymphomaniac Volume Two proves to be
the most harrowing – after all, one already knows that Seligman finds Joe physically savaged
in an alley, before the commencement of her narration to him. On L’s recommendation, that
she mentor an apprentice to take over from her one day, and despite her initial misgivings,
Joe approaches and befriends a teenage girl (identified as a suitable candidate by L) whose
parents are criminals. The girl, P (Mia Goth), is psychically scarred and vulnerable, and soon
attaches herself to Joe. Before long it is apparent that they are drawn to each other, and Joe
asks P to move in with her. In due course their relationship becomes sexual, with P taking the
initiative. Despite her misgivings, Joe starts initiating P into the mechanics of her debt-
collecting practice, but when P pulls a gun on a debtor during a particular job, Joe confiscates
it and forbids P to do so again, telling her that guns are not used.
Eventually Joe’s decision to groom P as her successor backfires. When one of their jobs
turns out to involve a house belonging to Jerôme, Joe instructs P to carry it out solo for fear
of being recognised. The price she pays for this, ironically, is to discover, sometime later, that
P and Jerôme are having an affair. Bent on revenge, Joe hides for them in an alley, armed
with the pistol she earlier took from P, but when she points it at Jerôme and pulls the trigger,
nothing happens because she forgot to rack the slide. Jerôme proceeds to beat Joe mercilessly
until she is unable to get up, and then he and P have sex in front of her, with Jerôme making
sure that Joe notices him thrusting in and out of P exactly as he once did when she asked him
to take her virginity. To add insult to injury, P urinates on her before she and Jerôme leave
Joe in the alley.
Having listened to Joe’s verbal autobiography, Seligman speculates that there might be
a causal link between Joe’s gender, the experience of being stigmatised for her extreme
otherness (with its concomitant shame and guilt) and her aggressive actions. Moreover, her
ostensible forgetting to rack the gun-slide might be an (unconscious) resistance to the idea of
killing someone. For once Joe does not challenge Seligman’s interpretation, apparently
because narrating her story to him has instilled in her a sense of peace and acceptance. She
decides to go to sleep, but in a shocking about-turn of narrative expectations, Seligman comes
back into the room, gets into bed with her (minus his trousers) and tries to rape her. In
darkness one hears Joe waking up, presumably grasping what he is up to, and racking the
slide of the gun. When Seligman starts remonstrating, explaining himself, a gunshot is heard,
followed by sounds indicating that Joe is collecting her belongings and fleeing from the
scene.
A note on methodology
Before embarking on an interpretive analysis of Von Trier’s two-volume film, I should point
out that my approach will probably be regarded as being highly unorthodox from a
methodological point of view, because I employ three different theoretical lenses to carry out
the interpretive task, and “unevenly”, to boot. These are psychoanalytic theory, Foucaultian
discourse-oriented genealogical analysis, and an ideology-critical perspective on
multiculturalism encountered in the work of Slavoj Žižek. I am fully aware that these are
divergent (and arguably even mutually exclusive) theoretical angles, particularly in the case
of psychoanalysis and Michel Foucault, given the fact that Foucault (1980) places
psychoanalysis (at least its Freudian variety) under the rubric of those discourses that have
wielded bio-power over the subject since its inception in the work of Freud. Nevertheless, as
several poststructuralist thinkers have shown, there is no privileged point of access to reality
– or rather, to what Jacques Lacan calls the “real” (that which surpasses language or
symbolisation; Evans 1996: 162), and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari the “virtual”; every
different methodological and theoretical perspective yields different accounts of the “real”,
and mostly not in such a way that they are complementary.
One of the most telling instances of such a multi-perspectival approach to the “real” is
found in Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (1987). As the title suggests, it consists
of a considerable number of methodologically, theoretically, ontologically and
epistemologically diverse essays that do not appear to have anything in common, until one
realises that – while certainly not comprising a unified ontological “field” of any sort – they
sometimes “leak” into one another or resonate in unpredictable ways. This suggests a vast, if
not infinite or overdetermined, kind of “territory” that is inexhaustible with regard to the
number of possible scientific, philosophical or theoretical approaches to it. While I certainly
would not claim to approximate this in the present article, one might say that A Thousand
Plateaus comprises my methodological (and therefore, because method and theory are
inseparable, also theoretical) model here, insofar as the three theoretical approaches I employ
draw on, and reciprocally illuminate, a cinematic text that is similarly overdetermined – that
is, allowing different, divergent interpretations without exhausting the potential of the text to
accommodate more such interpretations. In fact, one of the most interesting things about
Nymphomaniac (Volumes one and 2), is precisely that it lends itself to different theoretical-
interpretive appropriations, like the three I adopt (in a more or less sustained manner) in what
follows.
Finally, regarding the film narrative, a benevolent critic has reminded me of something
I was aware of, but did not consider important enough to comment on, namely that “body
doubles” were used in the explicit sex scenes, and during post-production the actors’ images
were digitally superimposed on them from the waist up (Saner 2014). My critic’s question
was whether this “would add value to the narrative of the film”. My answer is simply that
using body doubles happens in most films – not, usually, for explicit sex scenes, but usually
where stunts are performed – and while the use of such body-doubles could conceivably
constitute the subject of an inquiry into the implications of “simulation in cinema”, it is not
part of my present project. Here it is sufficient to treat this information as being relevant to
the conditions of possibility of the presentation of a film-narrative in audio-visual image-
configurations and -sequences, without pursuing its ontological (or perhaps psychoanalytical)
implications.
Freud on perversion
In Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, Freud (2011: 1387) disabuses his readers
of the no doubt customary prejudice, that sexual perversion marks a form of otherness which
is furthest removed from normal sexuality:
We must learn to speak without indignation of what we call the sexual perversions – instances in which
the sexual function has extended its limits in respect either to the part of the body concerned or to the
sexual object chosen. The uncertainty in regard to the boundaries of what is to be called sexual life, when
we take different races and different epochs into account, should in itself be enough to cool the zealot’s
ardour. We surely ought not to forget that the perversion which is the most repellent to us, the sensual
love of a man for a man, was not only tolerated by a people so far our superiors in cultivation as were the
Greeks, but was actually entrusted by them with important social functions. The sexual life of each one
of us extends to a slight degree – now in this direction, now in that – beyond the narrow lines imposed as
the standard of normality. The perversions are neither bestial nor degenerate in the emotional sense of the
word. They are a development of germs all of which are contained in the undifferentiated sexual
disposition of the child, and which, by being suppressed or by being diverted to higher, asexual aims – by
being ‘sublimated’ – are destined to provide the energy for a great many of our cultural achievements.
When, therefore, any one has become a gross and manifest pervert, it would be more correct to say that
he has remained one, for he exhibits a certain stage of inhibited development.
The pertinence of this passage for the film in question will become apparent in due course.
What must be added to it, however, is something that strikes one where Freud (2011a: 1484)
comments on another “perversion”, namely sadism, which is said to consist in “…the desire
to inflict pain upon the sexual object…”, which is biologically explicable by the need
(specifically on the part of the majority of men) “for overcoming the resistance of the sexual
object by means other than the process of wooing”, and which therefore appears to be linked
with an “aggressive component of the sexual instinct”. Sadism in the sense of perversion
proper, however, is recognisable by the fact that, instead of only comprising one constituent
of the “normal” sexual instinct, it has become dominant and in a sense “independent”. The
following observation by Freud is significant in this regard (2011a: 1484):
In ordinary speech the connotation of sadism oscillates between, on the one hand, cases merely
characterized by an active or violent attitude to the sexual object, and, on the other hand, cases in which
satisfaction is entirely conditional on the humiliation and maltreatment of the object. Strictly speaking, it
is only this last extreme instance which deserves to be described as a perversion.
This provides a clue regarding the understanding of nymphomania as so-called perversion.
Against the backdrop of his observation concerning the as yet “undifferentiated sexual
disposition” of the child, nymphomania would then appear as another of the constituents of
the “normal” sexual drive that has assumed a certain “independence” – the tail wagging the
dog, as it were. This explains the discomfort on the part of Joe’s colleagues, including the
woman who – in the role of her ‘boss” – instructs Joe to see a therapist, in the face of Joe’s
reputation as someone who has sexual relationships with a variety of men. Her distinctive
sexuality, functioning in a manner that appears to be “independent” of her other personal
attributes (evidently dominating them), causes her to be perceived as being, at best, on the
periphery of society.
That psychoanalysis enables one to formulate the implications of perceiving Joe as
being “perverse”, becomes even clearer when Jacques Lacan’s “revision” or reformulation of
Freud’s notion of perversion is considered (Evans 1996: 141-143). In one of his articulations
of perversion (which he sees as a “clinical structure”, and approaches differently from time to
time), Lacan formulates it in such a way that, unlike the hysterical subject, who questions the
symbolic order of society, the perverse subject can be seen as the personification of this
symbolic order. Metaphorically one might say that it is a matter of the pervert being “more
Catholic than the Pope”. Put in different terms, someone who is subject to the clinical
structure of perversion (here, Joe as perverse subject), identifies fully with what Lacan calls
the “phallus” (not the penis as male organ, but its symbolic counterpart, which represents
fullness of being), as a way of denying the “lack” that characterises every subject. However,
because the phallus is unattainable, the pervert has to be satisfied with a fetish of some kind
to hide the hole where the phallus should be (it is therefore understandable that Freud
regarded fetishism as the “perversion of perversions”, as Evans reminds one). The fetish, in
Joe’s case, appears to be her frenetic pursuit of genital satisfaction – in the absence of which
she suffers greatly; think of the episode where she discovers that she cannot feel physical
pleasure any longer – as if a kind of sustained physical jouissance could convince her that she
has finally overcome her own lack. By turning sex into a fetish, the perverse subject – here,
Joe as nymphomaniac – becomes the representative of the “full” symbolic social order,
whereas the hysterical subject questions and challenges it precisely as being lacking.
Ironically, in the scene where Joe finally decides that she cannot continue with the
conformism-inducing group-therapy sessions and confronts the others in the group, telling
them that she “loves’ her sex-organ, she might come across as an hysteric who questions the
(therapeutic expectations of) the symbolic order. However, on reflection this turns out not to
be the case; it is rather as perverse representative of the symbolic order – that is, as one who
believes that she has attained, or is capable of actualising it as a plenum, that she distances
herself from its putative (but spurious) representatives, who therefore appear as mere
custodians of anaemic conventional morality.
Foucault on perversion
Michel Foucault sheds more light on the phenomenon of perversion, albeit from a
countervailing theoretical perspective. In fact, whereas Freud, no doubt accurately, perceives
a spectrum of “undifferentiated” sexual dispositions on the part of children, most of which
are repressed in the course of “normal” development, Foucault (1980) uncovers the role of a
variety of discourses (including psychoanalysis) at work in the excavation and documentation
of a veritable menagerie of perversions since the 18th century. Discourse, in relation to
observed centres of diverse pleasures – that is, language in the service of power, intruding in,
and obtruding itself on, sexual practices incrementally deemed “unnatural” – Foucault shows,
has been responsible for elevating otherness in the guise of “perversion” to the level of
conspicuousness.
The first volume of Foucault’s A History of Sexuality (1980) represents, as one
reviewer put it, “A disconcerting but ultimately compelling reversal of accepted ideas”
(Richard Poirier, quoted on the cover of the book). The “accepted ideas” in question comprise
the belief, still widely held today, that the “Victorian Age” evinced a deafening silence on
everything sexual, so that one can legitimately claim that it was an age of “repression”. It is
impossible to do justice here to Foucault’s (1980: 3-35) finely nuanced, historiographically
informed account of the tension between silences and discretions, on the one hand, and the
veritable “explosion” of discourses about sex, with their roots in 17th-century (and even
earlier) ecclesiastic practices of confession, where penitents were encouraged to tell their
confessors everything, to the finest detail of thought, desire, speech and sexual act, lest they
fail to exorcise the demon of lust. These practices, which started becoming widespread in the
18th century, reached their apogee in the 19th and 20th centuries where, Foucault shows
persuasively, discourses on sex proliferated in every area of social, economic and political
concern, from medicine, psychiatry, education and the new science of psychoanalysis to
political economy. This “polymorphous incitement to discourse” (1980: 34) was motivated
by the same belief that underpinned the sexual orientation of Christian confession in the
preceding centuries, namely, that the truth about the human subject lies in her or his
sexuality, with the difference, that in modern society it was dispersed among a wide spectrum
of disciplines and institutions. In the case of the state’s interest in sex – its use and abuse, its
productivity and fruitlessness – it was oriented towards the newly prominent matter of
“populations” (which Foucault interprets in terms of “bio-politics” and “bio-power” later in
the book). The paradoxical point of all the energy spent on catching sex in a net of discourse
is formulated as follows by Foucault (1980: 34-35):
Is it not with the aim of inciting people to speak of sex that it is made to mirror, at the outer limit of every
actual discourse, something akin to a secret whose discovery is imperative, a thing abusively reduced to
silence, and at the same time difficult and necessary, dangerous and precious to divulge?...Doubtless the
secret does not reside in that basic reality in relation to which all the incitements to speak of sex are
situated – whether they try to force the secret, or whether in some obscure way they reinforce it by the
manner in which they speak of it. It is a question rather of a theme that forms part of the very mechanics
of these incitements: a way of giving shape to the requirement to speak about the matter, a fable that is
indispensable to the endlessly proliferating economy of the discourse on sex. What is peculiar to modern
societies, in fact, is not that they consigned sex to a shadow existence, but that they dedicated themselves
to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret.
In Nymphomaniac, too, when Joe’s aberrant sexual preferences become known to her
colleagues (as such things are usually bound to), she is encouraged to speak about it to others,
more particularly to a psychological counsellor in the context of group therapy for sex
addiction. The “mechanics” involved here – that subjects share their “story” with other
members of the group – are evidently based on the supposition that this would be conducive
to the “truth” being told, to the “secret” being divulged about every participating subject. But
there is more to it than this, as Foucault’s examination of what he provocatively labels “The
perverse implantation” reveals. In this section of the book (1980: 36-49) the philosopher of
alternative histories further debunks the commonly held conception of particularly the 19th
century as one of repression of sex and the limitation of sexualities to that form – the
conjugal couple – which would “…ensure population, to reproduce labor capacity, to
perpetuate the form of social relations: in short, to constitute a sexuality that is economically
useful and politically conservative…” (Foucault 1980: 36-37) This time, however, it is with
particular attention to the tracking down and identification, classification, examination and
control of multiple forms of “sexual heterogeneities” (1980: 37), or what is better known as
“perversions”. Foucault’s argument, in a nutshell, is that, far from merely a collective
frowning-upon and prohibition of such “unnatural” sexualities, the 18th and 19th centuries
were witness to “a multiple implantation of ‘perversions’” (1980: 37), which occurred via a
strange mutual embrace of power and pleasure – what he calls “perpetual spirals of power
and pleasure” (1980: 45). Institutional and professional agencies of power (educational,
medical, juridical, psychiatric) did not merely uncover these deviant sexual practices, but in
the process of subjecting them to discursive scrutiny, simultaneously generated the very
phenomenon that was regarded as marginal to society and labelled as “unnatural” (1980: 41-
47). To illustrate what he means by claiming that “modern society is perverse…in actual
fact”, Foucault remarks (1980: 47):
The manifold sexualities – those which appear with the different ages (sexualities of the infant or the
child), those which become fixated on particular tastes or practices (the sexuality of the invert, the
gerontophile, the fetishist), those which, in a diffuse manner, invest relationships (the sexuality of doctor
and patient, teacher and student, psychiatrist and mental patient), those which haunt spaces (the sexuality
of the home, the school, the prison) – all form the correlate of exact procedures of power.
The question is: where does Joe, the eponymous nymphomaniac of Von Trier’s film, fit into
this panoply of aberrant, putatively “unnatural” sexualities? One is afforded a clue by
Foucault’s reference to Don Juan, the legendary libertine, celebrated in various fictional
genres since the early 17th century. Foucault perspicaciously points out that the discursive
elaboration on various “perversities” added another reason to the “prestige” that this sexual
freak of nature, Don Juan, still enjoyed after three centuries, namely the discernment, beneath
all his other larger-than-life attributes, of “…the individual driven, in spite of himself, by the
somber madness of sex. Underneath the libertine, the pervert” (1980: 39). It seems to me that
Joe belongs in this category, insofar as she is the female counterpart of Don Juan: she has
(arranged) sex with more than half a dozen men a day, and even the man she loves, Jerôme,
eventually withers under her all-consuming sexual appetite and admits defeat, unable to
satisfy her all-consuming libidinal craving. And does her sexuality, too, similar to those of
the perverts examined, scrutinised and classified like the ones listed by Foucault (above), fall
into a category that can be said to be “the correlate of exact procedures of power”? Without a
doubt this is the case. However, having witnessed Joe’s change of mind, when invited to
speak – to let her aberrant sexuality speak – before the therapy group three weeks into group
therapy (in the accepted manner of a confession preceding the process of normalisation), one
might think that her explicit rejection of such normalisation amounts to resistance or refusal
which enables her to escape the web of discursive power. Nothing of the sort is the case,
however. Joe’s refusal is as much part of the spiral of pleasure and power – where power
invades nooks and crannies of pleasure and pleasure, in turn, seeps into the exercise of power.
What is at stake here is, in Foucault’s words (1980: 45):
The pleasure that comes of exercising a power that questions, monitors, watches, spies, searches out,
palpates, brings to light; and on the other hand, the pleasure that kindles at having to evade this power,
flee from it, fool it, or travesty it. The power that lets itself be invaded by the pleasure it is pursuing; and
opposite it, power asserting itself in the pleasure of showing off, scandalizing, or resisting.
Is it not precisely the case that, in resisting the attempt on the part of the psychological
institution, to tame her wayward sexuality, domesticate it and bring it into the safe fold of the
“normal”, Joe asserts a power of her own, and of her nymphomania, and wallows in the
pleasure it gives her to refuse ostentatiously? The other members of the therapy group are
visibly shaken, and because this happens in the course of a narrative that is cinematically
mediated, this is significant. The scenes and scene-sequences in the film constitute the visual
counterpart to the attention given to discursive detail in relevant discourses; in other words,
Von Trier’s film(s) can be regarded as a cinematic extension of the discursive work
uncovered by Foucault as being ambiguously positioned: on the one hand it has investigated
and documented phenomena of perverse sexual pleasures, and on the other hand it has
produced not only such sexualities as classifiable and “scientifically” comprehensible, but
also pleasures correlative to the sexual pleasures. In Nymphomaniac (understood as cinematic
counterpart of the relevant discourses), as much as in the discourses delineated by Foucault, it
is not only a matter of viewers witnessing Joe’s excessive, albeit socially marginal, pleasures,
but a corresponding pleasure, in the mode of scopophilia – the sexual pleasure of looking,
specifically at naked, sexually interacting or copulating bodies – is bound to function on the
part of viewers themselves. Needless to stress, such pleasure in viewing would not be
homogenous for everyone. While some (a minority, perhaps) are likely to identify with Joe to
the degree that their viewing pleasure would approximate her perceptible pleasure, others are
more likely to experience viewing pleasure on a spectrum of heterogeneity, ranging from its
privative mode (as disgust or repulsion) to pleasure derived from a kind of sympathetic
identification with a woman who is a peripheral figure to mainstream society.
At the level of discourse Joe’s tale to Seligman indeed forms part of proliferation of
discourses on sex; apart from his intermittent associative responses to the “episodes” of her
story, he becomes drawn into it to the point where he confesses to being “asexual, and a
“virgin”, and claims that this qualifies him to be the best possible listener to her narrative – in
this way making a contribution to the accumulating archive of discourses on sex. Add to this
his (no doubt for most viewers) completely unexpected attempt to rape her at the end, and the
strangeness of the film’s contribution, albeit “fictional”, to the discursive archive is
confirmed. (It could be argued, however, that Foucault’s account of the provenance of
discourses on “unnatural” sexualities in the modern era unmasks them as being “fictional” in
a less obvious sense.) As will be recalled from the reconstructed narrative, above, Joe also
delves into the dark world of sado-masochism (another interesting discursive-archival item)
in an effort to reclaim her sexuality at one stage of her quest to find her own sexual persona,
after discovering, to her alarm, that she has lost the ability to experience genital pleasure.
Admittedly, this exacerbates the impression of her extreme otherness, but it is important to
remember that the turn to sado-masochism – where she is in the role of the masochist,
suffering indescribable physical pain (at the receiving end of a cat o’ nine tails, among other
instruments of torture) is in the service of her nymphomania; of this there is never any doubt.
And (as indicated above) – in line with Foucault’s insistence on the connection between sex
and knowledge – she amasses such a store of sexual knowledge that, when she can no longer
be employed in a conventional work-environment, with the assistance of someone else (L),
she becomes a very unusual businesswoman – a debt collector with a difference (as
mentioned earlier) – who uses this (sometimes esoteric) knowledge to “convince” debtors of
various stripes that “they’d better pay up, or else…”. Nowhere in the film is the indissoluble
link between knowledge and power, so thoroughly examined by Foucault, demonstrated more
persuasively.
Žižek on multiculturalism
Slavoj Žižek (2010) provides one with the means of understanding Joe’s position in “normal”
society from another, again different theoretical angle of incidence, namely an ideology-
critical focus on the question of (the hegemony of) liberal multiculturalism (although it is not
difficult to detect the functioning, in the background, of psychoanalytical principles, such as
being unconscious of ideological fantasy orchestrating one’s behaviour). In the course of an
extended debate with Sara Ahmed on this topic (Žižek 2010: 43-53) – what the statement,
that multiculturalism is hegemonic, means – he responds to her claim, that it is not an
“empirical fact” (as Žižek argued on an earlier occasion), but a fantasy or illusion (2010: 43),
by pointing out (2010: 44):
When I claim that multiculturalism is hegemonic, I claim only that it is hegemonic as ideology, not that it
describes the reality of the predominant form of social relations [as Ahmed claims he did; B.O.] – which
is why I criticize it so ferociously. So when Ahmed writes that ‘multiculturalism is a fantasy which
conceals forms of racism, violence and inequality,’ I can only add that this goes for every hegemonic
ideology. I do not confuse ideological fantasy and fact – they are confused in reality: the reality of what
Ahmed calls ‘civil racism’ can only function through (in the guise of) the illusion of anti-racist
multiculturalism.
The latter (liberal, supposedly anti-racist, tolerant multiculturalism) makes its appearance,
says Žižek (2010: 46), in cases such as those where, for example, western politicians
distinguish between two kinds of Islam,”…as a great religion of spiritual peace and
compassion and its fundamentalist-terrorist abuse…This is liberal-tolerant racism at its
purest: this kind of ‘respect’ for the Other is the very form of the appearance of its opposite,
of patronizing disrespect. The very term ‘tolerance’ is here indicative: one ‘tolerates’
something one does not approve of, but cannot abolish…”
Žižek (2010: 46) goes on to state his disagreement with Ahmed regarding her
contention that such tolerance hides a monocultural underpinning of the form: “be like us…!”
Instead, he argues, it evinces a kind of “cultural apartheid” aimed at protecting a certain “way
of life”, despite the “superego demand” that the other become “like us”. Where the latter is
encountered, he adds that it secretly depends on the other’s (likely, if not certain) failure to
achieve such trans-cultural change, which would then justify one’s deprecation of their
inability to go the whole hog, as it were. This corresponds precisely with what Hardt and
Negri (2001: 191-192) describe as “postmodern racism”. In the face of the tacit agreement
that one’s skin-pigmentation is not what determines one’s cultural being (as modern,
essentialist racism claimed), but that it is one’s subjectivation (becoming a subject) in a
specific culture’s mores and values that is responsible for this, the postmodern racist has no
option but to endorse the latter insight. It does not stop there, though; postmodern racists then
add the rider, that one can never shake off these originary (original and originating) cultural
shackles: “Once a Jew, always a Jew! Once an Arab, always an Arab!” And mutatis
mutandis, in the context of Von Trier’s film(s): “Once a nymphomaniac, always a
nymphomaniac!”
This is not the place to go into the multiple grounds on which one can challenge such
(“postmodern”) racist claims; suffice it to say that poststructuralist philosophy has
convincingly shown that the discursive grounds exist for subjects to “re-invent” themselves in
a different cultural mode, if she or he so wishes: one is not decisively “spoken” by cultural
discourse, but as subject can also position oneself critically vis-á-vis dominant discourses, in
this way modifying one’s discursive-cultural subjectivity. This is abundantly demonstrated in
Lacan’s theory of the four discourses, where the questioning position of the “hysteric” in the
face of the “master’s discourse” (and the university’s, which supports the master’s) enables
her or him to arrive, with the mediation of the “analyst’s discourse” at a new subject-position
(Lacan 2007; Bracher 1994; Olivier 2009) If this were not the case, subjects who grew up in,
say, communities where racism was dominant, would not have been able to shake such a
racist disposition and inscribe a fundamentally different attitude to race in their own
subjectivity (Olivier 2009a). Regarding the film(s) in question, however, one might argue that
what is at stake in Joe’s nymphomania is nothing cultural, but deeply sexual, because it is not
her gender as a woman that is at stake. Even granting this point, however, one should be
reminded of Foucault’s claim, that sexuality is discursively produced, in which case Joe’s
self-conscious choice, (discursively) articulated to the members of the therapy group, to
embrace her nymphomania, constitutes a sexual position, albeit a freely chosen, “perverse”
one. Returning to Žižek, it is worth noting his distinction among three different forms of
racism (2010: 47). The first one consists in the outright rejection of the racial other as
“barbaric” in several possible ways (oriental, dictatorial, black, Muslim, uncivilised, etc.)
from the perspective of “authentic values” (civilised, democratic, Christian, western, etc.); the
second type of racism – which is the one Žižek is targeting here – is “reflexive”,
multiculturalist and politically correct. As already indicated above, representatives of such
multiculturalist racism single out certain events or group-conflicts as the embodiment of
ethnic, racist “horror” (for instance the Balkan war, South African apartheid or the Rwandan
genocide), contrasting these with the “civilised” way of doing things – “the post-national
liberal-democratic process of solving conflicts through rational negotiation, compromise, and
mutual respect” (Žižek 2010: 47). Contrary to first impressions, however, Žižek detects here
the elevation of racism “…to the second power”. While imputing it to ethnic others who have
not attained “civilised” modes of operation yet, such multiculturalist racists bask in the
sunshine of their self-righteousness. Thirdly there is what Žižek calls “reversed racism”:
instead of being repulsed by the exotic barbarism of ethnic others, such reversed racism
“celebrates” its vital authenticity that puts “inhibited” and “civilised” people to shame with
its “lust for life” (2010: 47).
What is the relevance of this elaboration on Žižek’s critique of multicultarism as
ideology for Von Trier’s film(s)? First there is the fact that, as indicated earlier, its putative
“tolerance” hides either the monoculturalist exhortation, discerned by Ahmed, to “become
like us” (western, British, American, or in the film, “normal” heterosexual women), or the
multiculturalist “apartheid” perceived by Žižek, which is intent on preserving a certain “way
of life”, even where it is accompanied by the invitation to join the cultural ranks of those who
display such tolerance. In the latter instance, the (mostly, but not always) predictable inability
of the cultural other to make the transcultural switch is then either greeted with derision or
“tolerantly” regarded with a certain “benevolence” which allows the cultural other “to retain
its illusions” (Žižek 2010: 46). More to the point, what does this mean for an understanding
of the invidious position in which Joe finds herself in the narrative of Nymphomaniac when
she has to choose (several times) between her own sexuality and a “normal” life – with
Jerôme and Marcel, her son, or (after choosing herself and losing them) in the form of
embracing “normal” sexuality as socially defined and mediated by the therapy group that she
joins at the insistence of her boss? Being accepted into the group, all of the members of
which (except for the therapist as a kind of authority figure) face problems of their own,
means that Joe is given the opportunity, like the others, to “become like the rest of
‘normalised’ society”. In Ahmed’s terms this “tolerance” evinces the sexual equivalent of a
kind of monocultarist hegemony (Žižek 2010: 46, 53) of obligatory assimilation of the sexual
other. In Žižek’s terms, however, it witnesses to what might be called “sexual apartheid”,
predicated on preserving a “normal way of life” (where women need not fear that their
menfolk be tempted by a woman with a voracious, insatiable sexual appetite).
Which is right in this instance? The scene where Joe starts reading a statement to
members of the therapy group – initially (as far as one can gather) intended to display the
form of a kind of confession like the one which opens a member’s contribution to Alcoholics
Anonymous meetings, namely “I am an alcoholic!” – but quickly decides against it and
abandons the ritual, is telling in this regard. What started out as a ritualistic confession
instantiating a normalising exercise aimed at re-integrating Joe into sexually “normal”
society, turns into a defiant statement, and performatively speaking, embrace of her
“perverse” sexuality; a discursive articulation of such graphic proportions that the members
of the group, sitting in a circle around her, wince visibly. Žižek (2010: 53) sums up the
outcome of this failed exercise admirably where he comments on such choices in a
“multicultural” society: “The catch here is that of the freedom of choice given to you if you
make the right choice: others should be tolerated only if they accept our society”. “Respect”
in multicultural society, therefore, is only really extended to those who give up their culture,
in the same way that, in Nymphomaniac, Joe is welcomed into the therapy group on condition
that she give up her sexual otherness. Her decision, not to do so, would provide little comfort
to those viewers who identify with “normal”, and “normalised” society.
Conclusion
The preceding analysis and interpretation of Von Trier’s film(s) have been carried out from
three different theoretical perspectives, although Žižek’s ideology-critical focus on liberal
multiculturalism presupposes psychoanalytic principles concerning the unconscious, as
pointed out earlier. This has arguably demonstrated the hermeneutic (or, in a different idiom,
semiotic) overdetermined status of the film(s) in question, given the fact that each of the
theoretical angles employed has yielded a rich interpretive-hermeneutic harvest. This is a
confirmation, further, of the viability of the methodological principle, that – even where
theoretical perspectives may appear to conflict – divergent theories of human behaviour
and/or action enable one to foreground different layers or aspects of the behaviour under
consideration, such as, in this case, (mainly) that of the fictional character of Joe in Von
Trier’s Nymphomaniac.
Finally, whatever one might think of the excesses of Joe’s sexual persona, one thing
stands out in the film – in Lacanian psychoanalytic language, she embraces her singular (and
singularising) “desire”, which is what one might call “quasi-universal”. That is, it is universal
in the sense that every human being is driven by her or his desire, but it is also completely
particular or unique (after all, even if it bears a superficial resemblance to that of another, it is
yours and yours alone to strive to fulfil). It is no accident that Lacan (1997: 311-325) exhorts
one to take up and “act in conformity with” your desire, that is, to appropriate it and pursue it
as if your life depends on it; in actual fact it does, because unless you do, you would never
get to the point where you could say that you have lived a “fulfilled” life insofar as it
approximates what is known in psychoanalysis as jouissance (Lacan, 2007: 18; Parker 2011:
42). All the trials and tribulations of her unusual, excessive, life notwithstanding, Joe chooses
to “take up” her desire.
There is a scene near the end of the film, where Joe climbs up a mountain, driven by
something in her that she cannot fathom. When she reaches the summit, she is confronted by
her “soul tree” – a real survivor of a tree with a hardy, gnarled and crooked trunk, anchored in
the rock, bearing all the signs of successfully resisting the elements that have torn at it
through the years without dislodging it. In short, recalling Joe’s father’s passion for trees,
which he shared with her when she was still young, this is Joe’s tree, a fitting visual
embodiment of her sexual persona. When first seen from Joe’s perspective, the image of the
tree fills her vision like a final, long-lost affirmation of her desire, and when the scene
switches, framing Joe and the tree together, from behind the tree, the viewer can no longer
have any doubt that this is indeed the case. Like her soul tree, Joe has clung to her desire, and
has remained intact, all the battering by social elements that she has had to endure
notwithstanding.
Works cited
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Bert Olivier discovered philosophy more or less by accident, but has never regretted it. Because Bert knew very
little, philosophy turned out to be right up his alley, because of Socrates's teaching, that the only thing we know
with certainty is how little we know. Armed with this docta ignorantia, Bert set out to teach students the value
of questioning, and during the 1980s and '90s he wrote in opposition to apartheid. In addition to Philosophy his
other great loves are the arts, architecture, literature, psychoanalysis and social theory. More recently he has
harnessed what little knowledge he has in intellectual opposition to the dominant economic system today,
namely neoliberal capitalism. In 2012 NMMU conferred a Distinguished Professorship on him, and at present
he is Extraordinary Professor of Philosophy at UFS. His motto is taken from Immanuel Kant's work: 'Sapere
aude!' ('Dare to think for yourself!')
